Chuck Reed's Letter

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed sent a letter to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig last week seeking a resolution to the stadium stalemate.

Reed mentions several things in the letter, but it's his opening sentence that stands out: "Even though a lot of time has passed, seven years to be exact, (emphasis mine) since the A's first considered moving to San Jose, we remain enthusiastic ..."

Wait, did he just say seven years? Like, starting in 2004? This flies in the face of what we have been told over and over about the depth of Lew's "efforts" in Oakland. It really begs the question regarding what was really going on when he started his career as a v.p of venue development under Steve Schott in 2003. We all know about Lew's South Bay leanings from as far back as 1998, which foretells why he was talking to San Jose when he was supposed to be "exclusively" talking to Oakland.

While Lew's longtime business partners were trying to bring baseball to San Jose, Wolff was proposing a stadium plan he deemed "feasible," but it would have required Oakland to fork over $300 million while putting down only $100 million of private money, an unrealistic plan in any California city, including San Jose. Another unrealistic proposal was his only large-scale Oakland stadium plan -- the impossibly complicated Coliseum-to-High Street plan.

And yet he claims that he tried in Oakland? Perhaps Larry Stone was right when he said that Lew Wolff would only make it look like he "tried" in Oakland, and then really try later to move to the South Bay as the "only" option.

We Oakland fans are called whiners and conspiracy theorists, and are accused of "living in the past" by a small but vocal minority of Wolff boosters. Yet, time and time again, the subject of when Wolff tried to move the A's to San Jose keeps getting brought up in the present, most recently in Reed's letter to Selig.

If the fact weren't clear before, Reed's letter takes care of that. Wolff was trying to move the A's to San Jose from the get-go. Thankfully, he hasn't been successful, and loyal Oakland baseball fans have not been left in the dust.